told that Brian Eno had passed over the chance to produce the album, a rejection that affected Brandon greatly. However, when working with Eno for Wonderful Wonderful, Eno told him that he was never offered the project in the first place. Tour Christian Hoard of Rolling Stone gave the Killers' concert at Madison Square Garden three-and-a-half stars, saying, "The Vegas quartet's maligned new album, Sam's Town, might pack more unfortunate big-rock bombast than its new wave debut, Hot Fuss, but it shares a generous hook quotient and a Vegas-y talent for crowd-pleasing. Before a frothy crowd, the Killers proved they've become a tight live band." Critical reception Sam's Town received generally positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 64, based on 32 reviews. Dan Martin of The Observer awarded the album five out of five stars and noted the album's sonic similarity to Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen, writing: "Improbably, this proves to be their masterstroke. Selling Springsteen back to his homeland might look like a canny way of ensuring radio play, but there's no disputing the quality of their songs. Indeed, as Hot Fuss sporadically intimated, the Killers are among pop's foremost practitioners." Comparing Sam's Town to the band's debut album Hot Fuss, Martin stated: "Crucially, Sam's Town sounds like a complete collection, with a far better strike rate than its predecessor." In a review for NME, Krissi Murison highlighted both the similarities to Hot Fuss and the evolution of the band's sound from the debut to Sam's Town, concluding: "All this, however, isn't to say that The Killers have gone all (God forbid) serious on us. The tunes may be huger, the influences cleverer, the lyrics more adventurous and the band more self-assured, but their primary concern is still being the biggest indie-pop stars on the planet. For all their smart new ways, The Killers are still as flashy, unintentionally funny, and flagrantly affected as ever – and this time we wouldn't even pretend to have it any other way." Conversely, Sia Michel of The New York Times called the album "painful" and ends the review with the statement that "The Killers are a talented band that evolved too fast, for the wrong reasons." Similarly, Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone noted a significant departure from Hot Fuss,